Orbit: Jack Kirby

This comic is a non-fiction work, giving a very brief biography of Jack Kirby, who, together with Stan Lee, created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and many other major comic characters.

Now, I need to stop right here. I say that he created them together with Stan Lee, and that's true to some extent, but it kind of depends on who you're listening to, just how much Stan Lee had to do with things. I've just recently watched With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, which paints Stan Lee in quite a positive light, as you may guess. (Incidentally, that's not a very good documentary. Don't watch it unless you're pretty bored. Then again, it's on Netflix, so at least it's free.) This comic, however, is certainly not kind to him:

Ouch.

The comic begins at the beginning, goes on to the end, then stops. Which is to say, it covers Jack Kirby's life from before he became involved with comic books all the way up through his death. It hits on a few major comic-related and personal events in the middle, but a brief comic like this could (as the comic itself admits) never hope to do justice to Kirby's contribution to the medium.

I'm not going to spend any more time here, recapping the comic--you can get that sort of information from Wikipedia, or the comic itself. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in Jack Kirby in particular or the history of comics in general. It's also a pretty nice example of what else comics can do, besides comedy and superheroes, so it's probably worth picking up just for the experience, if you've not read a comic like it before.